


See the Forest

by spacehopper



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Blood, Body Horror, M/M, Other, Tree Sex, Uninformed Consent, Xeno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-05
Updated: 2018-06-05
Packaged: 2019-05-18 10:11:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14850807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacehopper/pseuds/spacehopper
Summary: On an island that cannot be, in a forest that is one being, Jon finds what he seeks.Knowledge always comes at a price.





	See the Forest

The forest waits and always watches. And it will never let him go.

He never should’ve come here. He knows that now. But the papers had been waiting on his desk, written in a shaky hand. Statement of Mrs. Alice Trimble, regarding her brother, who had vanished at sea. Regarding an island that should not, _could_ not exist, and a boat the was always waiting. On top of the yellowing pages rested a note written in a crisp hand.

_The last statement of Edmund Waverly._

Gertrude’s predecessor, who had only lasted a year.

Jon steps into the battered dinghy. The sound is muffled, the fog like cotton in his ears. He clutches the tape recorder to his chest, damp hands slipping around the edges. He hadn’t meant to bring it, but then he rarely does. As he sits on the warped wooden board that serves as a bench of sorts, he sets it aside, scrambling for his phone in his pocket. But he only finds a spiderweb lighter, a pack of Silk Cut cigarettes, and a scrap of paper. His fingers leave wet marks as he unfolds it. 

A red inked sketch of a lidless eye stares back at him. Did he draw it? No, he can’t have. But the fog clouds his mind, and he’s no longer sure. He sets the paper aside, and with a jolt of terror, realizes he’s been moving this whole time. Traveling through what might be water, though it lacks the slap of waves or the rushing flow of liquid against the weathered wood. Perhaps it’s simply floating on the fog itself. He laughs then, high and nervous. He’d have dismissed the whole affair as absurd, once.

He doesn’t reach down to check.

The boat hits the shore with a dull thud, the sound smothered like everything else. Jon gets out of the dinghy, expecting a dock, or sand, or stone. But the ground gives like flesh beneath his feet. He stumbles, dropping the tape recorder. As he leans down to pick it up, his fingers brush the moss. Warm, soft, and yielding. Jon shudders, and turns towards the forest.

The island cannot possibly be large, uncharted as it is, but the forest seems vast and unending, the verdant mass before him twining together as if one organism. Crossing the beach to the nearest tree, he rests a hand on the smooth young bark and examines the leaves. Aspen. Utterly mundane, and yet a chill runs through him. Roots running below the ground, linking it all together. Aspen can spread up to forty meters from the parent tree.

He wonders what he’ll find at the center. 

As if in answer, the wind shivers through the trees, the leaves sighing and whispering. If he strains, he can almost make out the words, secrets taken and not easily returned. 

The tape recorder switches on.

Jon grips it tighter, but makes no attempt to shut it off. It’s the will of his god, isn’t it? If the entity that he serves can truly be called that. He almost takes comfort from the familiar whir, the way tape and breath catch, if only for a moment. The gloom of the forest is utterly silent, nothing but him and the ever watchful trees. He knows they mark his progress, and hates that he knows. That he can’t unknow. 

But it isn’t in his nature. 

The path he walks is eerily straight and clear, covered in the same vivid emerald moss as the shore. When he stops to look back once, the way behind him has closed. His lips twitch into a bitter smile, and he presses on. Will he be like Edmund Waverly, never to return? He doesn’t think so. Not from what Elias has said. The Beholding isn’t done with him yet. So on he walks. It’s farther than forty meters, this massive creature greater than its mundane counterpart. Or perhaps it’s just another illusion, and he hasn’t been moving at all. He stops to rest, leaning against a trunk, larger and older than those at the edge. His fingers catch on something round, rough. A knothole, oddly regular in form, an oval ending in a point on each side, and a circle in the middle. 

Jon stumbles back with a shout, cut off sharply as the fog chokes his throat. There’s no way out but in, so he jogs a best he can towards the center. Though he’s left the path, the roots seem to part before him, encouraging his progress. 

And then he sees it.

A massive tree, far larger than any aspen. And it is covered in gnarled, knotted eyes. All closed, but he knows, deep in the pit of his stomach, that if he does not do as they bid, they will open, and that he will not survive their gaze. Not as he is now.

He wonders if that’s what Edmund Waverly did. Tried to run, tried to escape, not realizing that there is no escape from the Magnus Institute. The statement was a warning, one Jon should’ve heeded. But he was too eager to find the truth, too afraid the opportunity would escape him. 

Foolish. Reckless. Hungry.

So he walks forward in measured steps, and sets down the tape recorder, placing his hands against the two bare patches he finds on the trunk. The wind is gone, the whispers faded, so he presses his ear against the bark. But it doesn’t speak. The Beholding only watches, and waits, and listens. 

His eyes fall shut, and his breathing slows. The feeling of being watched is oppressive, stronger even than in the Archives, and he can’t bear to look. He hears a faint creak, and something shifts beneath his palms. He doesn’t look, but he knows the eyes have opened. 

Something brushes his ankle, he can’t quite suppress his gasp, caught by the tape recorder, fed to the thing that watches. Roots, cutting into his flesh as they snake under his trousers and hold him tight. What feels like a branch caresses his cheek, but it’s too sharp, pricking out a thin line of blood. It’ll scar, and when Martin asks, he’ll make up some excuse. Only Martin will believe him, but that’s fine. It doesn’t matter what his lies are, as long as the others don’t know the truth. 

Maybe it will offer them some modicum of protection.

Leaves crunch, and cloth rasps against bark. Someone’s here. Or something, more like. He can’t quite hold back a dark chuckle. But he still can’t bear to look, can’t bear to watch, can’t bear to see. But the roots relax their grip, and he staggers forward, falling onto hands and knees.

“You can still go back, Jon.” 

His lips curl into a smile. What does it say about him, about what he’s become, that he can dredge any semblance of amusement from this?

“Elias. I shouldn’t be surprised.” He also isn’t surprised when Elias doesn’t respond. Just waits. He’ll get no more from Elias, not now. Likely not ever. He prefers to feed information in infuriating dribbles. 

“I’ll stay. I’ll pay whatever price there is.” A bitter laugh erupts from his throat. “Not like I haven’t paid it before.” It’s better than running, and wondering what he might’ve learned. To stop the Unknowing, to stop Elias. To stop. 

“And this, Jon, is why you’re the Archivist.” The words are fond, as is the tender touch against his head, the hand smoothing down his mist soaked hair. 

Something curls inside him, hot and sour, at Elias’s words, and he tries to shy away from this touch. But he can’t, as the roots curl around his legs and hands, ensnaring him in their web. Just like Elias had, from the day he signed that contract.

“You know, Jon, Gertrude never came here. But her predecessor did. Would you like to hear his statement?”

“The statement you left for me, it—” He closes his eyes as a root slithers up his calf. He remembers the statement, the odd red stain in the corner. “Edmund Waverly never left a statement.”

He looks up. Meets Elias dark, unblinking eyes. He’s smiling. Jon can’t tear himself away.

“Statement of Edmund Waverly, regarding a burned out island monastery and a sense of being watched.” 

There are vines now, sharp and strange, crawling over his back, encircling his chest. He winces when he hears the rend of fabric as the vines consume his shirt, leaving deep scratches in their wake. 

“Do you want me to continue, Jon?” Elias says blandly. Like he sees this sort of thing everyday. Maybe he does. He’s a monster, like all the rest, words prying into his thoughts and feelings, and holding him ever tighter. 

“Yes,” he says, then gasps as a another vine slashes through the remains of his shirt, cutting deeper. “Read it.” The blood drips down, soaking into the earth, feeding the abomination. 

Elias sits down on an old building stone like it’s a throne, and he is a king, indulging Jon’s pathetic whims.

“The boat was there, just like the fisherman’s sister had said, creaking and banging against the empty dock. That was the first odd thing I noticed.” 

The same boat. The roots are snaking farther up his legs, curling around his thighs, thorny growths tearing away the feeble protection of his trousers. Jon can’t stop the small moan as one digs deep. Of pain, his mind insists. His fingers dig into the earth. 

“A dock that large shouldn’t be empty. And it was. And not because all the other fishermen were out to sea. My uncle had been a fisherman, and I knew what to expect. But the ropes littering the warped wood were long rotted.”

Wetness ran down his legs, his back, his arms. Not blood, too slow, too thick. Sap, oozing out of the vines, the roots, coating his skin in scarlet liquid. 

“Except for Arthur Davison’s boat.”

Then he remembers.

“Elias, the dream, the statement—” Gertrude’s death, that prediction from the dreamer. He’d known it was true, the recording proved it, but he’d never really understood the import. The scarlet liquid, all flowing to one place.

Elias raises an eyebrow at him, a clear call for silence. The Archivist listens. And Elias speaks.

“I’d taken this job out of desperation, fired from my position at the British Library for, well. We don’t need to get into that. But when I’d started, I hadn’t believed in the supernatural.”

“The poor sod.” He hadn’t intended to say it aloud, but everything seems to be getting fuzzier, most distant. Perhaps a natural coping mechanism, as he frantically tries to ignore the way the roots linger on his arse, prying him slowly apart. He wonders if Tim might make some joke about how Jon can’t possibly be that desperate. But no. He wouldn’t. Not anymore. 

“Just thought that if some crackpot wanted to pay me to go through moldering papers written up by people who belonged in Bedlam, that was good enough for me. So I tramped down my trepidation and got into that boat.”

Jon speaks, his voice cracking as something stroked along his groin. 

“This is it, isn’t it. Beholding. The Eye. It took Waverly. He wasn’t good enough for it, and I guess it didn’t have a lackey like you to just shoot him.” 

Elias looks disappointed. He should be pleased, triumphant even. But instead shame creeps down his spine, followed by a sharp pain as a thorn drags along it. The sap. It must be getting into his blood. 

“And then the mist rolled in, and the boat rolled out. I couldn’t tell you how, by what mechanism it glided away from the dock, dragging rotted ropes behind it. Simply that I was not moving it, nor was any other force I could see. My hands gripped the sides, white knuckled.”

A thick branch brushes his face, and he shuts his eyes. He’d agreed to this exchange. And now—

“What else could I do but wait?”

His screams are muffled as the root thrusts into his mouth, long and thick, stretching his lips painfully wide. He tries to cough, to gag, but there’s nothing to dislodge it. Nothing to do but wait. Watch. Listen.

“I wish now that I’d dove into the sea. It would be a better fate than this.”

All he can do is moan as the sickly sweet liquid begins to coat his throat. His vision is blurry, but he can see Elias, outlined in scarlet, taking steady steps towards him. He runs a hand along Jon’s throat, and on reflex, he swallows. He has to swallow, or he’ll drown. And maybe that’d be better. But he has to—has to know. 

Elias crouches beside him, cupping his cheek and stroking his temple. And Jon can’t help it. He leans into the touch. Then Elias continues the story.

“When I reached the island, it was as barren as Mrs. Trimble had said. Fields of faded yellow grass, and bits of rock scattered between them. As I scrambled out of the boat, I approached one, noticing its strangely regular shape.”

Jon’s eyes lock on the stone Elias had been sitting on. There’s something carved into the surface. He tries to make it out, but the mist obscures it. He bows his head, letting Elias trace light fingers over the back of his neck. The tree is still moving, and he knows there is no point in fighting. He signed the contract. He has always been on his way here, ever since furious curiosity caught him in its web. And yet despite that, he still cries out when something hard and blunt presses against his arse. If not for the branch with bark like iron lodged in his mouth, the sound might have pierced the fog. But only Elias hears, rubbing soothing circles into his back. His one consolation is that it’s not too thick, smaller than the one stopping his voice. Cool, wet sap begins to seep inside him, but it’s different somehow. Not sticky, but slick. His mind shies away from the implication. It’s nothing. He may even be imagining it. 

More shocking than the root is the rasp of stubble against his skin, and lips pressed against his forehead. Elias lingers there, and for a moment Jon understands. And he is afraid. Then Elias continues.

“It was not rock, but rubble, a massive stone once used in a building. It was covered in muck, but underneath I could see writing. After a moment’s hesitation, I wiped it as clean as I could with my handkerchief, to read the Latin inscription. From what I remembered from my schooling, it roughly translated to this.”

Elias presses a firm hand against his cheek, and the root withdraws. He coughs viscous red liquid onto the ground in front of him, and takes a shaky breath. Is it over? He wants to ask, but his throat is on fire, and all that comes out is a croak.

Lips, slightly chapped and all too human, press against his, tender and almost kind. It’s worse than everything that’s come before, because it confirms his fears. That beneath it all, some part of Elias is still human. He didn’t need to be here, didn’t need to do this. But he cares. 

Then he whispers into Jon’s ear, “The Eye is always watching.”

Elias stands, turning his back on Jon and returning to his former seat. As Jon watches him go, desperate for release, he feels the root thicken inside him, in a way no true root would, pressing against walls of flesh like soil, seeking something deeper within. 

“Elias—” He doesn’t know what he’s asking for, isn’t even sure he wants it to stop anymore.

“Perhaps a reference to some arcane religious practice,” Elias says, ignoring his plea, “long fallen out of favor. Or a warning to trespassers. Based on the state of the stone, I don’t believe it worked.”

The root withdraws slightly, and for a moment, he thinks—

“No.” It twists inside him, forcing him to see. He is Waverly, walking to his doom. He is Gertrude, whose cunning could not save her. 

“Now that it was clean, I could see the stone had been blackened by some ancient flame. I recalled that during the early Christian period, there had been a number of monasteries on nearby coastal islands. Perhaps this was one such island. Quite the discovery, if so. And perhaps enough of one that I might free myself of the Magnus Institute.”

The laugh scrapes along his throat like glass. No wonder Waverly failed. He hadn’t learned that there was never any escape from the Magnus Institute. And it says something about him, doesn’t it, that he finds this funny. He looks up to see if Elias shares his amusement, then groans as the root plunges back in, deeper, thicker. The bark seems rougher than before, and he can’t quite forestall a whimper of pain, and a cry of twisted pleasure. 

“As I made my further into the center of the island, the rubble became more frequent, and it began to have form and structure. Here, perhaps, an outbuilding where grain might have been stored. There, sleeping quarters for the monks. Though I stopped to examine each of my finds, there was no more writing.”

He realizes he’s hard, and can’t even care anymore. In many ways, this is less painful than other monsters he’s encountered. The root stretches no more, just maintains its inexorable rhythm that would rock him forward were he not so firmly held in place. And it knows, it always knows. Tendrils flare below him, brushing feather light against his cock. He gasps, barely aware Elias has stopped his recitation. 

Then the rhythm ceases, and the tendrils hold him still. As if drawn by a string, his head lifts, and what he sees before him is not Elias, nor are the words that echo from that gaping maw his voice.

“An itch crept up my spine, and I spun around. But the island was as empty as ever. And yet I could not shake the feeling I was being watched. A feeling I’d had since I was coming here, if I were being honest. And one I’d felt only one place before.”

The sap, it must contain some hallucinogenic elements. Or perhaps, he thinks darkly, it’s simply magic. For embedded in the largest tree is a giant massive eye. And it is shut. Below it, there is a dark hollow, and Jon knows it wasn’t created by anything natural. There is no wildlife here. And he knows the voice that comes from it belongs to Edmund Waverly.

“The Magnus Archives.”

The tendrils tighten, and the root plunges in, painfully deep and huge, and Jon can’t bite back a sob as his vision goes white, and then—

He opens his eye.

Around him scarlet liquid flows through the massive forest. Aspen, he remembers. All one organism. All flowing to this central hub, this ruined Archivist who has come to serve a different purpose. Is this to be his fate as well? But no, as soon as he thinks it, he knows.

He knows.

White hot pain spikes through his skull, and he knows, he knows—that when Sasha had been taken, the pain had been unbelievable, that bile collects in Tim’s throat, and even if he is only an assistant, he can’t escape, that Martin still dreams of the worms crawling under his door, that once, Elias—

Pleasure mingled with a far more physical pain twists through him as the tendrils tug and pull and he comes, finally, and the forest, the tree, the eye—they take it all. 

Let him go.

He’s shaking violently, arms barely holding him up. And as awareness returns, he realizes the mist is freezing. He can’t move, doesn’t dare to collapse here, but also cannot bear to stand. Footfalls. He can’t run, but what would be the point?

A cry is torn from his throat as thick, warm cloth is draped over his back, abrading the myriad cuts that dot his skin. A hand on his hair again, warm and human, and he can’t help but lean into the touch.

“I’m sorry, Jon. But you agreed.”

And he had, hadn’t he? More the fool is he. 

“You didn’t finish the statement.”

“Ah yes, right you are. Where were we?” He knows. He knows, but he’s going to make Jon say it, damn him. Jon holds out as long as he can, as Elias wraps gentle arms around him and pulls him to his feet.

“The Magnus Achives.” His tongue stumbles over the words, and he wishes he could never say them again. Could forget the Archives, forget this all. But he can’t, can he? That’s why he’s the Archivist.

“Is that what you see?” he says instead, as he stumbles through the twisting path with Elias’s help, clutching the soft blanket close. But of course Elias doesn’t answer. He so rarely does. Instead, he continues.

“I dismissed the thought as absurd. Silence and solitude often brought strange thoughts to bear, and I was a man of logic, of research, who trusted facts and not superstition. So though the feeling continued to grow, I pressed onward.”

He feels it now, the watching. Stronger than ever. Like it’s seeing how Jon will react. Like it’s fascinated. But that is it’s nature. And Jon is no longer sure he’s truly different. 

He needs to hear the end of the story.

“When I found what must have been the chapel, I exclaimed in delight, for it was largely intact. While the stone was as blackened here as the rest of the island, and the roof had long since collapsed, the walls stood high and solid. I eagerly ventured inside, hoping that perhaps there would even be the remains of some long lost holy relic.”

“Blackened,” Jon mutters. 

“Do you have a question, Jon?” He blinks at Elias in surprise. He’d refused before, but perhaps now that this barbaric ritual has concluded, it’s different. And perhaps he has the tiniest bit of pity, despite all evidence to the contrary.

“It was the Lightless Flame, wasn’t it? The Desolation. It attacked this island.”

Elias smiles, and Jon feels something ignite within him.

“Indeed, towards the far end of the room, a massive cross sat, seeming almost untouched by time. Despite my earlier eagerness, I approached slowly, for as soon as I had entered the chapel, the feeling of being watched had increased tenfold. But it was not that feeling which made me stop, which made my blood run cold and rooted me to the spot. It was the cross itself.”

“I saw it,” Jon whispers as Elias helps him into the boat. 

“For in the center of the cross was a staring, lidless eye.”

He shuts his own eyes then, lets the world fall away. He’ll regret it later, but for now, he leans against Elias, taking comfort in this warm semblance of humanity.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” Words murmured against his brow, pressing into his skin, digging holes into his chest.

He doesn’t answer. Elias knows.

“Statement ends.”


End file.
